Revelatory Routes

Aluna Theatre's hitting the right dramatic and political notes in Panamerican Routes/Rutas Panamericanas, the first Toronto theatre festival devoted to human rights, presented in association with Theatre Passe Muraille.

We caught two of last week's shows, Urban Odyssey and Parting Memories, both powerful statements and exciting performances.

Urban Odyssey, conceived and created by Federico Restrepo and Denise Greber for Loco7, uses mime, dance and puppetry to explore the immigrant experience in America. Huge puppets, dressed as business people and manipulated by smaller human figures, loom over the immigrants.

Interminable questions are hurled at the newcomers, who include a centaur-like man who has trouble getting a job despite the assurances of authorities. A woman hides fearfully in a tent, which becomes her costume in her few tentative sallies into the world. Both characters have to decide whether to leave or stay.

There's pleasure here, too, in the playfulness of a silver-wired puppet, first small-scale and then large, suspended from the ceiling.

Filled with striking visuals, the show goes beyond the immigrant American experience to look at archetypes of the Other, the dispossessed and the homeless.

Violeta Luna's Parting Memories has the audience sitting onstage with Luna watching her play out, mostly silently except for recorded voices, the trickiness of moving to another country. The set is a hopscotch game, with shoes, a shovel, a suitcase and various other props on the numbered squares. The audio, covering a revolution, disappeared people, racial slurs and keeping a family together, is intentionally fragmented, as are the videos, which include an archaeological dig that unearths a living person. A fresh loaf of bread, broken open, holds items from the character's life.

Luna involves and implicates the audience in striking fashion: first-row viewers are tied to their chairs, and later the performer invites people to stamp her naked body with words like "immigrant," "illegal" and "terrorist."

The festival continues this week with a remount of Aluna's Nohayquiensepa, Carmen Aguirre's Blue Box and a reading of Rosa Laborde's Marine Life. Running simultaneously with the performances is a conference on theatre that looks at migration, displacement, corporate responsibility and human rights; Aluna partners with the U of T's Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.

Raising Caine

The art of cabaret is alive and well, thanks to the Green Door Cabaret, which has been running at its intimate space on the ground floor of the Lower Ossington Theatre for a year now. Helmed by Robert Missen, the room features an eclectic mix of performers: jazz, spoken word, poetry - you name it.

Last Friday, Rebecca Caine, known to local audiences for her musical theatre work (she created the role of Christine in the Toronto production of Phantom Of The Opera) and opera (Lulu, The Cunning Little Vixen), delivered a spirited set that amounted to a mini history lesson in musical theatre.

She began by lamenting the fact that most modern musicals lack roles for sopranos; they're made "for belters." She then took us back to the era of musical singing stars and performers who either "drank themselves to death or married into the aristocracy."

These ditties were perfectly suited to Caine's sweet-toned voice, and she exuded what we see too little of these days: real charm. Between songs, she regaled us with backstage anecdotes, little bits of trivia (who knew that 1930s dancer/singer/actor Jessie Matthews was related to our own Sharron Matthews?) and a couple of bitchy (but fun-spirited) jokes, too.

Highlights in the first half included I'll See You Again, dedicated to the memory of baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who had passed away earlier that day; Gangway, a cute novelty song that wouldn't be out of place in The Drowsy Chaperone; and two contrasting numbers from My Fair Lady, impeccably thought through and sung.

The second half focused on more contemporary musicals, but even here Caine produced surprises, like a brilliant song from another version of Phantom Of The Opera (by Maury Yeston) and two Sondheim gems. She ended the concert in style with a bravura performance of Think Of Me, from the better-known Phantom, and returned for a moving encore: Jean Valjean's Bring Him Home, preceded by a story about soldiers singing that song in Afghanistan.

The highlight of the night was her duet with her Toronto Phantom co-star Byron Nease on All I Ask Of You, which they made more than the saccharine wedding song it's since become.

A class act. This Saturday, poet and musician Robert Priest performs, and on Sunday musical theatre star Susan Cuthbert performs at the Green Door Cabaret.

Ghostly Screw

Against the Grain Theatre, known for its imaginative takes on opera, tackles one of the best chamber operas of the past century, Benjamin Britten's The Turn Of The Screw.

As in the novella by Henry James, an impressionable governess in an isolated English country house comes to believe that her young wards are the instruments through whom two lustful servants attempt to connect with each other. The twist? The servants are ghosts, manipulating the children.

Joel Ivany directs a production that features Miriam Khalil (a moving Mimi in AGT's La Boheme) as the governess, Megan Latham as the housekeeper, Johane Ansell and Sebastian Gayowsky as the children; Michael Barrett and Betty Allison play the ghosts. Pianist Christopher Mokrzewski is music director.

Ginger tours

Before that, the production - directed by Walker's artistic collaborator, Morgan Norwich - has a fundraising performance here in Toronto.

It's well worth catching if you haven't seen it, or even if you have. Walker plays 12-year-old Nicholas, a ginger-topped kid whose father has remarried and brought an ex-Jehovah's Witness, golf-pro bride into their home. Add a schoolyard bully and a larger-than-life alter-ego/imaginary friend and you get a funny, touching show.

Want more from Nobody's Business? The company has a new production in this summer's Fringe, The Other Three Sisters, which transplants Chekhov's tale of sibs yearning for the big city from Russia to Canada.